


Pawns of the Gods

by Oshun



Category: The Queen's Thief - Megan Whalen Turner
Genre: Banter, F/M, Humor, Infatuation, Mental Anguish, Tenderness, Wedding Night, Yearning
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-18
Updated: 2017-12-18
Packaged: 2019-02-16 09:24:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,961
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13051167
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Oshun/pseuds/Oshun
Summary: The Queen and King of Attolia negotiate their wedding night. Love is easy, trust is harder.





	Pawns of the Gods

**Author's Note:**

  * For [dblanc](https://archiveofourown.org/users/dblanc/gifts).



>   “ _He could tell her he loved her. He ached to shout it out loud for the gods and everyone to hear. Little good it would do. Better to trust in the moon's promises than in the word of the Thief of Eddis. He was famous in three countries for his lies._ ” ― Megan Whalen Turner, _The Queen of Attolia_.

Their day had begun to the sounds of the high-pitched singing of traditional paeans by flower-crowned maidens accompanied by musicians on flutes and lyres. There had been pious and solemn songs as well as sentimental ones extolling the innocence of young love—the latter almost laughably inappropriate. Other hymns of questionable musicality—inharmonious to the modern ear—dated to ancient origins and those were chanted in a language so archaic that one could not even discern the sense of them. If that were not enough, other lyrics had even been edited to include honor to the gods of Eddis as well as those of Attolia. Eugenides had only met her eyes twice during the interminable procession to the atrium of the temple and again during the official wedding ritual. He did allow himself a single quickly subdued smile on each of those occasions. She could not determine if those fleeting smiles indicated wry amusement or perhaps only nerves.  
  
Although she managed to keep her voice calm and even, Irene had nearly been sick to her stomach during the exchange of their wedding vows. Her guts wrenched in reaction to her conflicting feelings of dread, desire, love, impatience, and intermittently sudden flashes of fear. She had no doubt that he believed he loved her. But how could he possibly know what love meant?  
  
She decided they must be satisfied for now and try to reach a greater measure of trust with the passage of time. She would have to begin with the assumption that he was young and passionate and believed himself to be hopelessly in love. She was without a doubt inexplicably, desperately infatuated with him. These comprised mighty thin starting points for a marriage. Although many intimate relationships were constructed on even flimsier foundations. This one seemed more than a political marriage and yet far less than an entirely personal arrangement, despite Eugenides’ protestations of love. But then, hadn’t they both always been committed to principles and loyalties beyond personal preference? This strange mutual obsession each with the other might arguably have been considered an unexpected benefit of their unlikely union granted by someone’s god or gods.  
  
Irene had never been in love before and found it in equal parts exciting and terrifying. Her face burned at the thought of him even when she was alone and without any witness. Once she had finally admitted it to herself, she had known with certainty that for her it could only ever be him. The thought was no comfort. He was so young. What if he grew tired of her? What if, his ardor cooling, he found someone just as lovely, much kinder, and without her onerous weight of responsibility and their painful shared history?  
  
At her request, Relius had probed and found no evidence or even gossip that the young man had any previous history of love affairs either. She remembered the sweetheart he had invented the first time she encountered him disguised as a commoner and not the quasi-legendary figure of royal blood with fearsome skills and gifts nurtured by his gods. She could not resist smiling at the thought of his casual impudence. Lies fell off his tongue like blossoms dropping from fruit trees in the springtime. Much later, she had wondered if there had been a romantic entanglement between him and his cousin Helen the girl-queen of Eddis. But that had been naught but rumor put to rest as soon as she observed the two together. It was plain for her to see that they were like brother and sister, certainly not lovers.  
  
And, in any case, how could he have ever found any lover worthy of him? And what woman, other than her, could have dreamed of wanting such a creature? He hid his heart as easily as he was able to hide his identity. She, however, had eventually seen beneath his layers of masks and lies. He was still annoying. But in her uncharacteristically reckless perversity, she found his antic genius compelling. His youthful grin and his rakish good-looks—enhanced rather than flawed by the feather-shaped white scar which stood out against his brown skin—grew more and more appealing as the days raced swiftly by them.  
  
Eddis and her little Thief had dreamed up an offer that only a bloody-minded fool would have refused—a solution to both the problems of her kingdom and their own. She was no fool and had grown resigned to the fact that she yearned for him as well. Irene had often envied Eddis her clever Thief for political and practical reasons. As Queen of Attolia, she had never been anyone’s dupe. Although Eugenides had tricked her, more than a few times, she had nearly outwitted him as well.  
  
No, she was no fool and yet she was, as much as she had tried to suppress it, a flesh and blood woman. Despite her experience, she was still very young. His wicked grin, his wit, and his wild determination had softened and opened her heart to him. A liar and a thief, he was incongruently loyal and principled and capable of love. Who could not succumb to the looks of transparent adoration he gave her the instant they found themselves alone and unobserved?  
  
Ah, but the guilt and horror at what she had done to him still gnawed at her. His punishment had been based on logic. She had sentenced him based upon frantic reasoning, no small amount of goading from the agent of her enemy and tempered only by a maddeningly neutral warning from a goddess. But it had seemed at the time the only course open to her. It devastated her later to consider how he and the Queen of Eddis had quickly enough dreamed up a diplomatic solution. When faced with the same dilemma she had felt cornered and harried and had acted in desperation. And, after making a hideous choice that had left her grief-stricken and blood-stained, she still faced all of the same threats.  
  
Their wedding had been the most joyless one that she had ever had the misfortune to observe—except perhaps for her first one. Yet, some people had been pleased by her first marriage. This one pleased no one. Every noble in the land had either wanted to wed her himself or been actively backing a surrogate whom they believed they could manipulate in their own interest. Sitting next to Eugenides on the dais, she looked out, as the feasting began, at an expanse of faces as glum as any she had ever seen.  
  
When they, at last, were led in yet another noisy procession of warbling maidens to her chamber, she emphatically ordered everyone away, except for her closest ladies in waiting. She even closed the door in the faces of her own ladies at the entrance into her bedroom, although she knew in compliance with custom, that at least a few of them would wait out the night in the antechamber.  
  
The argument about her reducing her personal guard seemed to have erupted out of nowhere. Eugenides sounded so confident and sure of himself. Their fury, born of frustration and insecurity, had resulted in her throwing the inkpot at his head. Of course, he deftly dodged it. He moved as though to embrace her and she shuddered, no longer able control her emotions, snarling at him like a feral hound.  
  
When he tried to apologize for provoking her, she shrieked, “Don’t you dare try to touch me!” bursting into great wracking sobs. That threw open the floodgates for him as well. He drew back from her, stunned and horrified and began to shamelessly weep himself. She was shocked and surprised but instantly thought that she should not have been. He never bothered to muster any of the false courage or vanity which would have restrained most men under similar circumstances.  
  
She pulled herself together and opened the drawer next to the bed and thrust a clean handkerchief at him. “Please stop crying now! I have stopped and I have far more to cry about than you do!”  
  
Eugenides sniffed, took the handkerchief and blew his nose hard, twice. “Ha!” he huffed at her and grinned. “I could dispute that, Irene.” She half thought he would gesture toward his missing hand as proof of his assertion, but he didn’t. He lowered his chin and looked up at her with mournful puppy-dog eyes and stuck out his lower lip. To her surprise, she found his exaggerated pantomime attractive and amusing.  
  
He shrugged and said, “I am still afraid of losing you, my beautiful and terrifying wife.” His voice sounded tender and his eyes had turned soft and warm. “Most of all I am really tired of arguing. And, honestly, I’m starving. Is there any way that we could get something to eat or drink? You must be hungry too. You did not eat anything at our wedding feast either.” He blushed and smiled—happy. Yes. He was attractive and he knew she thought he was. He was very good at reading people. She had only in the last few days begun to understand the extent of that.  
  
“What a shame we missed the food,” she said, feeling her cheeks warming, but she tried to keep her voice cool and level. “I expect the feast was excellent.” She felt her mouth twitch in the tiniest of smiles.  
  
Beaming back at her, warm brown eyes twinkling, Eugenides struck her again as being more than a little handsome with his glossy black curls mussed and tumbling onto his forehead. He did have beautiful features. His dark skin contrasted against his brilliant white teeth and full red lips. If only he had not been so heartbreakingly young she would have admitted sooner how pleasing he was to the eye. But he did at least look older now than he had when she'd had his hand chopped off.  
  
“I was told by one of my dance partners,” he said, “that each dish was a marvel—that the entire feast would be recorded in the chronicles as magnificent.  Gah! At the time, her bleating about the food in graphic detail made my stomach lurch.”  
  
“While you were chattering and flirting with your dance partners, you never even looked at me.” She scowled at him, knowing full well that she was being unfair.  
  
“We agreed not to appear too friendly with one another. If we want to pull this off, we cannot seem to be besotted with one another. Harder for me to do than it is for you!” He grinned good-naturedly at her. “Now you complain about how convincing I was!”  
  
“So, you couldn’t you tell how nervous I was?” Used to controlling her emotions, she knew she had worn a mask as bland and impassive as his own face had been throughout the marriages rites and his coronation. “I have plenty to be anxious about also. We hardly know one another,” she said, mortified at how thin and plaintive her voice sounded.  
  
“Oh, I think we know one another very well. Perhaps we only know the really important things and none of the simple, ordinary details. But we will learn that stuff. We are motivated, right?” He reached out and tilted her chin with his left hand as though he meant to lean in and kiss her. But he didn’t. She was beginning to think he might intend to tease her for a while before attempting to make love to her.  
  
“As though there could be anything simple or ordinary about you!” she complained, shaking her head in mock irritation, before rolling her eyes at him. She could not restrain the smile playing about her lips. “He talks to the gods and they answer him. What kind of creature are you? You are cleverer than all of the rest of us but pretend to be an addled child. I am finally onto a few of your tricks at least, Eugenides!”  
  
“Call me Gen. All of my friends do.” He grinned at her. She tried to calm her thundering heart. How could she have fallen in love with this irritating man-boy?  
  
“You may call me Irene when we are alone,” she said, sniffing and squaring her shoulders.  
  
“I know you have surely noticed that I already do, my queen,” he answered with a smirk of delight. “That is the sort of thing that you are very careful about. If it bothered you, I know you would have already corrected me.”  
  
She sighed deeply, wanting to reach out and touch the feathered scar on his smooth, otherwise unblemished cheek. She wondered if he even shaved yet. “I am sorry for yelling and breaking things.”  
  
“No apologies necessary, my darling Irene.” He winked and smiled. “I think we needed to clear the air, don’t you?”  
  
“Remember when you kissed me in the tent before that reeking weasel Nahuseresh and his troops arrived to supposedly rescue me?”  
  
“How could I forget that? You looked at me with a face filled with pure loathing. Perhaps the lowest point of my life.” She doubted it was lower than the night when she took his right hand.  
  
“I did not realize that you believed you were kissing me goodbye forever. I thought you wanted only to assert the right to make use of my body as you chose, that you wanted to show me that you had won the game.”  
  
“That hurts! How could you think I thought that! I had already told you that I loved you. I did believe it was my last chance. I never wanted to dominate you. Not then, much less now. I did want to kiss you before I died.”  
  
“I’m sorry; it was a stupid assumption on my part. We have a lot of mistrust to undo, on both sides! But can you at least see now why it wasn’t a better kiss? Can you ever forgive me?” Her voice caught and her eyes filled with tears again.  
  
“There was never anything to forgive. I only wanted to free you and save all of us. It was another one of my mad schemes—one with very high stakes. But more often than not they have worked. You may think I’m a foolish liar when actually I am fumbling idealist, but one with a quick wit at times. I promise I will never try to touch you again unless you want it. Perhaps if I am very well-behaved, you will kiss me later. It is customary on one’s wedding night, I’ve been told.” He gave her the puppy-dog eyes again and she slapped him hard on his upper arm, which caused him to smile at her as though she had kissed him.  
  
Well, that had been a clever retort on his part. If she wanted him to make love to her now, then she would have to make the first move. It felt as though she kept backing herself into corners with him. Could they ever reach a place where they would not always be second-guessing the other?  
  
Before they reached their bedchamber, she had worried, as young as he was, and being such a warm and energetic type, his main concern on this night might have been to get her naked. She looked across the room at her bed with its high mattress piled with downy pillows—the view of it unobstructed by its diaphanous curtains—their bed now. But once again she had underestimated Eugenides. Her little show of temper had resulted in him turning the tables on her. It had necessarily cast her in the role of a seductress. She’d felt him tremble with fear and with longing under her hand before, but had hoped to feel him melt with passion for her on this night. But she had never assumed that she would be the one to guide the process. She had taught herself how to flirt with men when it was expedient, as in the case of smarmy, manipulative Nahuseresh, but she had never thought to have a need to initiate lovemaking. She was as green as a fourteen-year-old maid.  
  
‘ _First things first_ ,’ she thought, ‘ _I’ll have to worry about that later_.’ “What kind of food would you like?” she asked, sniffing and clearing her throat, fearful of crying again. He immediately needed something to eat. She had learned already that he was snappish when he was hungry and was hungry more often than most.  
  
He smiled at her, tender and nearly wistful. He appeared to respond well to a gentle manner. How unfortunate that she had never cultivated one.  
  
“I’ll eat anything without sand. You should ask for the kinds of things the kitchen staff knows you like. I’d prefer not to be poisoned on my wedding night. Tell them you are famished! Tell them that domestic brawling gives you an appetite. Of course, everyone heard you screaming and smashing things. No doubt that wall will need to be painted. High-quality ink you wasted! I’m surprised someone didn’t break in and try to save you.”  
  
“Perhaps they thought I did not need to be saved or, worse, that I did not deserve to be saved.”  
  
“The last is hardly the case!”  
  
“In their eyes, I sold my kingdom—their kingdom—to Eddis. And I chose the trickster Thief of the Queen of Eddis to be the King of Attolia. Not so easy to forgive.”  
  
“I expect it was more likely the first. Rather humiliating how quickly everyone around you assumes that I am no threat to anyone. They think you have saved their homeland from invasion by sacrificing your youth and beauty to an incompetent goat-footed idiot.”  
  
“Not so strange given how very skilled you have become at convincing people of that.” She wrinkled her nose at him playfully and thought of how she wanted him to kiss her soon. She wished desperately that she had not pushed him away earlier. “How about cold roast chicken, cheeses, and some fruit? Do you like lemon cake? I love lemon cake. And they will have trays and trays of our traditional Attolian pastry of honey and nuts.”  
  
“Yes! Ask for all of that and don’t forget to emphasize that you are debilitated by hunger!”  
  
“Shhh! I would not have allowed this plan to come so far if I intended to try to starve you to death.” He rolled his eyes as though he doubted the truth of her statement. Finding her slippers, she shook them before putting them on, not certain whether they contained shards of the broken ink pot or not.  
  
Opening the bedroom door a crack, she hissed, “Phresine!” in an urgent stage whisper, desperately hoping her oldest lady-in-waiting had not yet gone to bed—unlikely given the amount of noise that she and Gen had been making and the woman’s protective instincts.  
  
Irene recited the list of the food she and Eugenides had agreed upon, adding wine and water, and requested a broom and a dustpan. Phresine frowned at both of them and looked pointedly at the ink-splattered wall. “Yes, my queen,” she said, bowing as she retreated.  
  
“Thank the gods,” Irene said. “The food will be here in no time. Phresine will see to it.”  
  
“And you claim you have no loyalty to among the nobility. Hence, you need your bloated Queen’s Guard. Clearly, that old dragon adores you.”  
  
“Well, she’s a childless widow who’s lost all of her lands, the few that her husband ever had. Anyway, let’s not start that argument again tonight!”  
  
“Fine. May I raise it again in six months?”  
  
“As though I could stop you!”  
  
“Of course you can. I promised I would never try to wrest power from you on domestic issues, only offer advice.”  
  
“Observe then! Let’s discuss it again in six months.” She tried to give him a look that she hoped appeared, if not conciliatory, at least open to reason. The impossible creature grinned at her. “I have something to tell you,” she said. “I hope that it will not make you lose your appetite.”  
  
He groaned. “I beg of you, Irene. Please try to be gentle with me. What now?”  
  
“Nothing so bad as that,” she said, overwhelmed by a sudden surge of urgent tenderness that she had never before felt for anyone, not even for Eugenides himself when she had surreptitiously lurked outside of his cell in the dungeon listening to his nightmares and his suffering after the amputation of his hand. “Nothing bad at all. After we eat . . . I know what you want . . . after we eat, I want you to make love to me. But I have neither the knowledge nor the courage to initiate that. I need for you to be the one to begin . . . .”  
  
“My sweet, beautiful Irene! That would be my greatest pleasure. I think you may have overestimated my own experience, but I will apply myself to wooing and winning you—heart and body—using every means at my disposal and the greatest patience. If tonight turns out to be too soon . . .”  
  
“I think it is not too soon,” she said determined to undo any reluctance she had caused by her earlier rashness. “Will you please kiss me now?”  
  
This time he moved close enough for her to smell him. He did not use perfume and certainly did not wear hair oil like that worn by ambassador of the Medes, which hung in the air like a pungent miasma of coercion and falseness. Nothing masked the Eugenides’ natural clean scent. She could not resist reaching her hands into his mop of curly hair and ruffling it, releasing the faintest hint of bergamot-scented soap. Relaxing against him, she allowed her eyes drift shut. His look of concerned tenderness disappeared in a heartbeat and teasing grin replaced it. He leaned closer in. “Do not let your emotions cloud your reasons,” he whispered, his voice full of mischief.  
  
“I want emotion to cloud to my logic.” ‘ _I want you to subdue my nerves and calm my doubts_ ,’ she thought.  
  
He lifted her chin with his left hand and kissed her. It was easy for him. She was still taller than he was, but he wore his formal shoes, resembling elegant riding boots, with thick soles and elevated heels. Her feet rested flat on the floor in her bedroom slippers, so that their eyes were nearly level.  
  
It was nothing like the first time he kissed her when he had been desperate and she had wrenched herself away from him. He had kissed again a few days later after she had agreed to wed him. That kiss had been soft and slow and just as she had started to respond he had stopped, giving her a shy but hopeful smile. This time he began gently also, but did not stop. This time she responded and he intensified the pressure, softly opening his lips and she welcomed him. Just then someone knocked on the door.  
  
“That must be our food,” he whispered. “I think we must answer the door.”  
  
“I suppose we must,” she answered, her tone reluctant and impatient. “You must eat! But hopefully it won’t take long.”  
  
“Ah, yes! That’s my girl! I trust you that we can pick up where we left off.”  
  
“If we don’t, I will have you hanged before anyone can save you!”  
  
“I love you, Irene.” He laughed. “I promise you may trust me.”  


 


End file.
